Simon Marainen lost both his brothers to suicide
- ellinorfristrom
- May 16, 2021
- 8 min read
Updated: Jun 9, 2021
Just about 60 miles south of the Three-Country Cairn where the borders of Sweden, Norway, and Finland meet is Nedre Soppero a small Sámi village with around only 30 inhabitants.
There are no stores in sight and to buy groceries you’d have to drive 29 miles south unless you’re satisfied with the small provisions you can get at Blind’s petrol station in Övre Soppero another 3,5 miles further north.
Simon Marainen is 41-years-old and has lived his whole life here and like most men in his village he is a reindeer herder but for him, that wasn’t always an obvious choice.
Seven years ago, Marainen’s younger brother Gustu had driven out on his snow scooter to the reindeer on the fell but never returned.
Like many reindeer herders Gustu worked in the mines to support his lifestyle as a reindeer herder. But Gustu had a dream. He wanted to get away from the mine, and so he decided to invest in a truck. The plan was simple, in the winter he would use it to transport reindeer and, in the summer he would rent it out for road constructions.
But things didn’t go as planned, and Gustu went into personal bankruptcy. The debts followed him, and he got negative responses from his contact with the authorities the months before his passing.
“He was somehow happy and yet depressed, he was depressed because of the coming winter, he said ‘this is going to go to hell for the reindeer', but still he was still positive outwards, towards people,” Marainen says.
Shortly before his passing, Gustu had tried to sell Marainen both his reindeer and machines for a small sum of money. At the time, Marainen had no intention of getting into reindeer husbandry and thought his brother only meant him well and kindly declined.
“In hindsight, when I think about it, I think he had decided that he didn’t want to live this life anymore, that he had decided that he was going to leave earth and life,” Marainen says.
Gustu did not just leave a hole in his family’s lives; he also left behind his beloved reindeer, a responsibility Marainen now decided he would take over.
“I know that I could have done other things in life that I might have been better suited for, but it means so much to be a part of this, and I feel that I have good support from my surroundings, and I have good friends, and you can’t manage it on your own,” he says.
When it seemed like life couldn’t get much worse, ten months later, Marainen's youngest brother Heaika decided to end his life at only 21-years of age.
“But he knew, had been suicidal before, and my first brother who passed away said that he thought it was the worst option in the world to end one’s life voluntarily, but it was he who did it first,” Marainen says.
"But my other brother he was suicidal, and received help for it, but I think my first brother's suicide affected him very badly, and he started to feel a lot worse after his suicide. So it turned into a spiral, and one thing led to another, some kind of domino effect", he says.
Lars Jacobsson, professor emeritus at the Department of Clinical Sciences at Umeå University, has done several studies on suicides among Sámi. Jacobsson has not seen any higher suicide rate among Sámi in general but says reindeer herding men stick out compared to the rest of the Swedish population. He believes this can be explained by their distinct male roles and duties and the loneliness that comes with the lifestyle.
“It’s a very pressured financial situation and a lot of solo work with keeping track of the reindeer, especially in the winters when they are down in the forests, and this is mostly a man's work,” he says.
Making a living as a reindeer herder today is very difficult. Deforestation, climate change, encroachment on land and water, predators, and the rising costs with the introduction of machines such as snow scooters have made it increasingly difficult to make ends meet.
“You see it with everyone who does reindeer husbandry here, there is not a soul that does not have extra income. It is not possible to only live on reindeer today,” Marainen says.
“There are very big challenges all the time, and to always feel mistrusted, and misunderstood it’s difficult plus these climate changes we experience, and intrusion from left and right, and lawsuits it’s also a big thing, a big burden to carry,” he says.
Simon points to a map hanging on the wall. “These lands were ours from the very beginning,” he says making a wide gesture across the map.
“This is all that was left of our lands after 72, this little he strip here,” he says, pointing to a small stripe of green on the map.
Marainen's village, Saarivouma, has long had to fight against the Norweigan state for their right to their reindeer grazing pastures in Norway. As the years have passed since the Nordic borders were drawn up the Saarivouma Sámi have lost most of their lands in Norway, and are forced to pay fines when their reindeer crosses over on the other side.
"We have had to pay fines for a line on the map," Marainen says. "There is no fence or any natural borders".
Before Marainen took over from his brother Gustu as a reindeer herder, he worked in the cultural industry and even had his own band Ára. Today Marainen has left most of his musical ambitions behind but gladly takes on smaller jobs when the opportunity presents itself. When he was invited to the Sámi Language Week, he drove the 150 miles south to Jokkmokk to teach both adults and children how to joik a traditional Sámi song method, which has long been oppressed by both the church and state.
Chairs have been spread out in a semi-circle facing Marainen. It is an unusually quiet group of people and only one of the people present takes the courage to joik with gusto in front of the others. But what they don't joik they make up for in discussion. They talk about the historical oppression of joik by the church and state, and how many older generations of Sámi today still looks down upon joik from years of shame and oppression.
But it wasn’t just joik that receded into silence, even the Sámi languages were oppressed, and today most Sámi can’t speak their mother tongue, and some have been completely cut off from their heritage.
“It’s very sad that the state has deprived so many of their mother tongue and disgraced the Sámi the way they’ve done,” Marainen says. “And this colonialism is not over yet. It continues to this day on so many levels”.
To Marainen keeping the Sámi languages alive is very important, and he is determined to pass it on to his children. When it was time to choose a school for his daughter, he and his partner decided to send their daughter to a school in Karesuando, 35 miles away at the border between Sweden and Finland.
“We have a municipal school here in the neighbouring village, 6 km away, but there they are entitled to a maximum of 40 minutes of Sámi a week,” he says.
“So she takes a taxi, seven years old she has been doing it for a year, it’s the second year now. She commutes 120 km a day in a taxi. There is a school here, but there are not those opportunities that would give my daughter schooling according to her conditions. In Karesuando, the conditions are better, and we are lucky to have school so ‘close’,” he says making finger quotes with his hands.
Today there are only five Sámi schools in Sweden, and they are all situated in northern Sápmi.
“It’s like a lottery some children have that opportunity but the majority have absolutely no opportunity at all to learn their mother tongue,” Marainen says.
At the moment Marainen lives alone with his 3-year-old son in Nedre Soppero. His partner currently lives in Norway 220 miles away in Evenskjer where she works at a school teaching Sámi languages. Due to the border closure, because of the pandemic, she can’t commute to Norway and is instead living there at the moment with the other two children. Today Marainen is going to drive all the way to the border to pick up his two youngest.
Despite all the challenges that comes with reindeer herding today Marainen believes the biggest factor behind mental health issues among reindeer herders lies in their colonial heritage.
“There is an underlying structural racism, and discrimination against minorities, but that’s the same all over the world," he says.
"But it is precisely this to constantly have to fight for everything, to constantly be on your guard, to constantly feel misunderstood, to constantly have to fight for your existence on all levels in life, that's the underlying problem here. And the Swedish state has never really recognised these abuses against our people, and our lands and waters".
Marainen believes people know too little about Sámi people and their history with the state and church and says educating people about Sámi history and the abuses they have lived through would be a first step in the right direction.
“You don’t teach about the Sámi people, you don’t teach about the problems that exist, you don’t teach about the thefts that were committed up here, you don’t teach anything about the Swedification. You don’t teach about the threats, and persecutions, and harassment, and brainwashing that has been going on for four hundred, five hundred years up here”.
Simon says this is also reflected when Sámi people do try to seek help for mental health issues in that they are often not understood. He believes Sweden should do more to educate psychologists to have more of cultural competence for Sámi, similar to how they’ve done in Norway.
“Just something like that would be a huge step, to be able to go to someone you feel understands you. If you go to a psychologist here in Sweden in Kiruna or Gällivare, I dare say that I’m 100% sure that you have to explain what your life looks like, and even though you explain, they still don't understand your culture and your worldview”.
Jacobsson also believes reindeer herders have to become better at adapting to the Swedish healthcare system and says reindeer herders also tend to keep their problems to themselves.
“I don’t like to use the word macho because it's not about being macho," he says.
"If you're alone on the fell then you have to survive on your own, they're sort of brought up to get by on their own. But that is an issue in that when you get problems of more personal nature like anxiety, worry, and uneasiness, it's not something you talk about, and you don’t seek help, but you try to cope with it on your own”.
Marainen agrees and believes many might find it difficult to seek help, to begin with, but sees it as a result of the colonial politics that still affect all Sámi people to this day.
“You’ve had to prove that you are strong, you’ve had to fight in headwinds for hundreds of years, and it has shaped man. To show that you can, show that you are tough, show that you still stand on your feet, and show outwardly, that you can’t break me, but eventually the individual doesn’t have the strength stand on his two feet anymore, and in the end, everything just collapses,” he says.
“It’s a result of the abuse that's been going on for hundreds of years, and I think my brother was a product of that”.
Watch the documentary about Simon Marainen here
Comments